Entities that do businesses on the Internet frequently request visitors to their sites to fill out forms with demographic and other information. Web sites such as the New York Times web site (www.nytimes.com) that provide free access to news, sites such as the Adobe Corporation web site (www.adobe.com) that provide free downloadable software, sites that provide free magazine subscriptions, sites that provide free or paid services such as a free e-mail account, free Internet access, and similar others, ask a user to fill out a form that includes a user name, contact information, and the like. In some cases the forms are so lengthy that repeated requests for such information causes an annoyance to a user, who would rather get the information or download the software than take the time to fill out a lengthy form. The providers of these forms, however, would like to have as much information about the user as possible, so that they could obtain a profile of the type of persons that are interested in their products or services. It would be useful to both the user and the provider if the user can store all his information at a single location and authorize the release of such information to any person or entity.
Some other examples of entities that request such personal information include credit verification agencies acting on behalf of lenders, utility companies, landlords and the like; and information gathering entities such as health insurance companies, doctor's/dentist's offices, consumer or product surveys, and magazine subscriptions.
With the ubiquity of the public computer networks, commonly known as the Internet or the web, a new way of disseminating personal information has become possible. The meteoric rise of the Internet has enabled it to become a key application development platform. Notwithstanding the availability of these information networks, there is currently no method whereby a user can enter and store his personal information at a single location and selectively authorize it to be distributed to a number of entities. Therefore, there is a need for such as system and method.
Additionally, there is no method whereby the user can update or make changes to the personal information stored at the single location—whether it is a single server computer or a collection of server computers comprising a distributed system—and cause the changes to be distributed to all persons or entities that need to be notified. Accordingly, there is a need for such a system and method.
Further, there is a need for a system which allows a classification of information according to a security or other hierarchical class structure, and provide the classified information to only those entities that have a need to know or are authorized by a person who owns the information. Moreover, there is a need for blocking unauthorized access to such personal information, while allowing access by authorized persons with ease.
Old methods of collecting and disbursing personal credit information required credit reporting agencies to gather and disburse information about individuals and companies, and to disburse this information to entities that request such information. In general, such disbursement is performed after an individual authorizes the release of such information. While these companies gather credit information from several sources, they often provide incomplete or inaccurate information that is not verified by the user until a later date. Additionally, routine form-filling, designating personal preferences such as the user's likes and dislikes, providing finger-print, retina scan, DNA sequences and other biometric information for later use, or responding to a survey or a health questionnaire is not performed by these credit reporting agencies. These problems with the existing methods can be alleviated by the presented invention as described in the following.